Function predictor? Submit your work to the CAFA meeting

Last July I introduced CAFA: Critical Assessment of (Gene and Protein) Function Annotations. Recap: the number of genomic and metagenomic sequences is growing at a horrendous rate. We are inundated with sequence data, yet the fraction of useful information we can glean from these sequences is steadily decreasing. There are simply too many sequences, and they are getting extremely diverse. Even when we have the sequences of the genes and their RNA or protein products, we are clueless as to what many (by some estimates most) of them do. There are many algorithms to predict the function of proteins, but they have not been compared on a large scale yet. We, the CAFA challenge organizers decided to have some fun: we released the sequences of some 50,000 proteins whose functions are unknown. Some 35 research groups predicted the functions of these proteins using their own software, and uploaded their predictions to our server.

Credit: Brazma et al, European Bioinformatics Insititute

The first phase of CAFA is over: the predictions are now in, and we will be assessing them soon. But if you want to participate in the AFP (Automated Function Prediction) / CAFA meeting you still can. Even if you were not a predictor this round, but you are a bioinformatician developing gene function prediction algorithms, please consider submitting an abstract to the AFP/CAFA meeting. The best abstracts will be selected for oral or poster presentations. And at the authors’ discretion, they may be extended to a full publication in a peer-review journal.